At an hour which should never be seen on a Saturday morning, I hauled myself onto a train to Wolverhampton for LugRadio Live 2009, after Lucy kindly let me have her ticket. I hadn’t been to previous LugRadio Live events, but I’d been assured that they were not to be missed.
Starting with the good stuff—the venue was also easy to get to from the train station and seemed to have the capacity to cope with the numbers (some people were standing up during talks, but there were plenty of free seats too). The talk on OpenStreetMap was both interesting and entertaining, and Gervase’s discussion of his first computer program had us all in stitches. I also had chance to meet up with people who I hadn’t seen for a while and mock Pokebook. 🙂
On the downside, the programme left some room for improvement. Most speakers had a one hour slot, which is fine if you are prepared to talk for that long, but most weren’t. This lead to an embarrassing moment at the end of two of the talks I attended, where the speaker finished after about half an hour and tried to keep the questions going to pad the remaining time. There were also two “no shows” that I was aware of, which was a real shame and quite a high proportion of the total number of speakers, although it’s something that the organisers have no control over.
In comparison to OpenTech—an event of a similar size and cost—LRL seemed a bit subdued. However, on its own merits, LRL stood up reasonably well—albeit to a lesser extent than I expected from the hype—and was worth attending, though it will be interesting to see what happens next year.